And the Stars Were Calling
by Akasya-Wolf
Summary: "Everyone has a destiny. Everyone has a path. Everyone has a plan. But sometimes it is necessary to stray from the stars to the shadows to understand, to understand what it is to hold light in your hands. Sometimes it is necessary to stray from the stars to truly know." AU
1. The Red Balloon

The night overcame like an iron curtain, cloaking the city in a brusque, deafening black. Beautiful black, cleansing the world of flawed light; blemished features in the sun, disappeared with the moon. Iron to iron. Steel to steel. The city never slept, but its inhabitants did. Well…Most of them. Like a soulless monster, it ate and grew with ennui, the city. Covered in a shinning light it bled, covered in a safe shadow it spread. And in the city, the shades between white and black thrived and swayed. The white, the people of innocent, lost hope. The black, the people of corrupt, self-greed. And the grey. The prey of the black, and the wards of the white. The grey, the people of ordinary. So nominal. So insignificant. So…free. He always wanted to be free. To truly understand, but dead in the crevasses of the twisted matter which might have been called a heart years ago, he knew. Cool and calculating was the answer, and he _knew_.

People's pain, so real, so pungent, so commensurable, so… transient. Like a river, it ran. Like the world, he would also forget. It was his fate to forget, his destiny. And there was no escaping what was written in the stars.

Like the night it came. And it took.

He sat at the station, stiff-necked and composed, aware but unaware, watching the grey, the people scuttle by. Living their meaningless lives. Even he, who knew, was insignificant in the grand scheme of things. Even he, who knew, was human, just as fleeting as the others. Even he, who had always known.

And the train was coming.

Gaara looked up. The station was full now, with thousands of people moving in quick shifting masses. Before his sharp eyes, people fused, changed, and became total dissimilar entities. Like the shadows they thrived in silence, but not.

He head heard once that a human being met one hundred thousands of the nine billion people on earth in his or her lifetime.

One hundred thousand people. One hundred thousand peoples' personalities, essences, thoughts, identities. One hundred thousand people he graced with his strange, peculiarities. With his asymmetrical thinking. With his –

_Pop!_

A red thing. A red thing against the white noise; it had been a little balloon trailing a little boy trailing a little woman. The boy's hands bunched in the woman's skirt; and all he saw was the red balloon floating up and up and up and up and up and up and…

And the train was coming.

Gaara watched as the boy realized his mistake and his face scrunched up like little kids do, and he started to throw a tantrum like little kids do, and somehow in the dark muddled mass of nerves in his brain clicked and Gaara got up and walked over to the boy. He walked over to where the boy was rolling around on the cold, silent cement, banging his fists while wild rivers of tears ran down his face. Crying children were ugly; he watched the young mother, embarrassed and frosty tried to yank the distraught youth from the filthy ground. All he could see was it replay over and over and over. And all he could hear was…

And the train was coming. Almost there.

He'd better hurry. The stars were calling

Gaara, a stranger to the scene of the child's life; Gaara, who effortlessly jumped and retrieved the balloon, as if it had been as easy as breathing. Gaara, who with a small smile, knelt down in front of the boy and made a connection. Gaara whose eyes met the little child's. Gaara whose eyes met the runny nose and the redden, shining eyes. Gaara who saw as the mirror of his smile reflecting back. Gaara who heard the mother's complaints cease as he handed the small red balloon to the small boy next to the small mother. Gaara who met the child's eyes and he knew. He _knew._

And the train was here.

And the stars were calling.

One out of one hundred thousand.

And he took a step back because he knew. He knew.

And as the train pulled in, and as the boy waved, and as he waved back, and as the grey moved around him, he knew. He knew.

And as the train pulled in, he pulled back and closed his eyes. Because he knew. He knew.

The stars.

His destiny.

And eternity was calling.


	2. The Metal Snake

If it had been anybody else, she would have believed it. Anybody. The mailman, with his off-grey eyes. The bag-lady, with her crooked smile. The window-washer, with his dead-filled whispers. If it had been anybody else, she would have believed it. Anybody; somebody passing by telling her, her laughing, shaking her head, carrying on like a normal day. Like a normal day in which she donned her uniform and smiled. But standing in the strange little hospital room, with the smell of ammonia wafting through the air, donned in her uniform, she started to frown.

She was all but forced to believe her eyes.

Tubes grew and twisted and twirled and constricted like a great metal snake. Around his body like a merry-go-round; they dehumanized him, made him more machine, more monster, more mechanism. Less man.

Her frown grew.

It made no sense.

Sabaku no Gaara. She had glanced at him this morning watering his flowers, while she, herself had fetched the mail. They had waved at each other. A good-natured smile. Sabaku no Gaara. Her neighbor. Her _happy_ neighbor. The music teacher. The man that smelled like gingerbread. The man who never failed to welcome new residents to the neighbor with a well-placed greeting card. The man who always smiled.

Sabaku no Gaara.

Her neighbor of four years.

The man wore sweater-vests, for pete's sake. _Sweater-vests_! She scoffed. And now apparently, he also had a propensity for jumping in front of moving trains.

It made no sense.

His eyes, cream green, hadn't shown that look. _That _look. She usual got it on the side of the bridge, wind slicing the side of her face with a frozen caress. That look of absolute despair. That look of impulsiveness. That look of rashness. That look of wanting to end it, all of it, with one last throw-up. Most would back down with a tender remark, or a sound call. The idea of leaving their progeny, their adorned, their hearts, snapped them out of a down-ward spiral and they would come out crying like new-born babies. Coming back to the light. But then, there were the lost. The truly gone. The ones that you could tell, their eyes, their soul, they were empty. Fraught. Cynical. And they were the ones she hated most, for they made her stomach lurch. And all she just wanted to do was empty her stomach on the side of the road. Because she couldn't even dream what made them want…made them such empty husks of the reality. And she feared one day, one day it might come to her too.

But as she stared down at the man she could at least call her friend, she couldn't imagine anything that could have made the man want to leave the world in such an abrupt manner. Such a happy man. Such a happy smile…

…They had had a conversation on Saint-Saens just the other day, right after bumping into each other at the grocer; even though she had had not a clue what the lime-eyed man had been leisurely prating about, besides that fact that it somehow, in _some_ way, involved music, she had nodded and given her commentary at the appropriate times. According to what _she_ had understood, the young cellist had been selected to perform a solo part at a prominent music festival or something along the lines of it…If the vegetative man lying before her had been so set on death, why? Why?

All the facts contradicted each other in dissimilar patterns. Nothing made sense, nothing concluded. Nothing was logical. If only she could speak to the man in front of her, awaken him from his dead, dreamless slumber, and just _ask._ It wasn't everyday a task came to her partial as this. She gazed listlessly at his stoic face, pale and clammy, his auburn hair pasted to his forehead in muddled clumps, masked in fluid. If only she could…

_Click. _

"Officer Uzumaki?" There was a stutter. "O-Officer Naruto Uzumaki?"

The blond haired woman slowly spun around, golden chords of ribbons swirling around her like a waterfall of light. And as a warden of state she smiled her everyday smile. A smile that could reassure even the most unstable of people; a smile that could reassure event the youngest of children.

As one of the white, it was her job to solve the unfathomable. The impossible. The uproar. And it was her job to salvage her friend's soul. Her mission.

"Yes?"


End file.
